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Check out MacRuby and some of the Obj-C bridges for other languages (MacRuby isn't bridged though), you'll be pleasantly surprised. You still start out with th

by tumult 17y ago

Check out MacRuby and some of the Obj-C bridges for other languages (MacRuby isn't bridged though), you'll be pleasantly surprised. You still start out with the same set of classes and methods as in Cocoa+Obj-C, but how you abstract on top of it can be radically influenced by the language you're using. Lexical scoping with real anonymous functions, for example, is a huge win. It catches Obj-C up to the 70s, at least :)

cesare 17y ago
Yes, MacRuby is something slightly different. Still, I would suggest people who are seriously interested in developing for the iPhone to check if plain Objective-C works for them, first. My recipe is: - Objective-C for the minimum necessary to deal with the iPhone specific APIs. - plain C for critical parts which need to be optimized for speed and memory consumption. - your favorite embeddable language implementation (mine at the moment is TinyScheme, but I've also used Lua) for scripting. Also, consider that often you may need to include libraries written in c or c++. This is trivial to do from Objective-C.
- tumult 17y ago
  Yes, I actually agree with you. Especially iPhone is a little ways off from being suitable for a scripting language.
  - davidw 17y ago
    No it isn't. As I said below, Hecl works fine on phones much slower than the iPhone. Ok, you don't want to do a big, huge complex app in a dynamic language, but they would be just fine for quick one-offs. Just like with regular computers...
    - tumult 17y ago
      Yeah, but that's not very interesting, so I don't include it :) You can do big complex apps in dynamic languages though. But iPhone is a somewhat restricted environment (not THAT restricted, really) where you are encouraged to use as small a footprint as reasonably possible.
      - davidw 17y ago
        > Yeah, but that's not very interesting, so I don't include it :) Stuff like PHP indicates that plenty of people are quite happy to do quick one off's. Or Tcl/Tk for Unix, or VB for Windows. Scripting is a very sensible idea, and phones are quite capable of handling it these days. I think it's extremely interesting creating something that opens up development to more people.
        tumult 17y ago
        The ends and the means are not necessarily the same thing! I would rather teach a new programmer Scheme, Python, Ruby etc than PHP, VB, etc.
        davidw 17y ago
        Sure, those languages are better, but the point is making programming more accessible to more people (something Python has done quite well too, indeed).

by tumult 17y ago

cesare 17y ago

Yes, MacRuby is something slightly different. Still, I would suggest people who are seriously interested in developing for the iPhone to check if plain Objective-C works for them, first. My recipe is: - Objective-C for the minimum necessary to deal with the iPhone specific APIs. - plain C for critical parts which need to be optimized for speed and memory consumption. - your favorite embeddable language implementation (mine at the moment is TinyScheme, but I've also used Lua) for scripting. Also, consider that often you may need to include libraries written in c or c++. This is trivial to do from Objective-C.

tumult 17y ago
Yes, I actually agree with you. Especially iPhone is a little ways off from being suitable for a scripting language.
- davidw 17y ago
  No it isn't. As I said below, Hecl works fine on phones much slower than the iPhone. Ok, you don't want to do a big, huge complex app in a dynamic language, but they would be just fine for quick one-offs. Just like with regular computers...
  - tumult 17y ago
    Yeah, but that's not very interesting, so I don't include it :) You can do big complex apps in dynamic languages though. But iPhone is a somewhat restricted environment (not THAT restricted, really) where you are encouraged to use as small a footprint as reasonably possible.
    - davidw 17y ago
      > Yeah, but that's not very interesting, so I don't include it :) Stuff like PHP indicates that plenty of people are quite happy to do quick one off's. Or Tcl/Tk for Unix, or VB for Windows. Scripting is a very sensible idea, and phones are quite capable of handling it these days. I think it's extremely interesting creating something that opens up development to more people.
      - tumult 17y ago
        The ends and the means are not necessarily the same thing! I would rather teach a new programmer Scheme, Python, Ruby etc than PHP, VB, etc.
        davidw 17y ago
        Sure, those languages are better, but the point is making programming more accessible to more people (something Python has done quite well too, indeed).